Nickeluli

I’ve been working with freelancers from all the world for the last 18 month. It’s an easy way to get things done fast. You post your assignments, and then workers may bid on your project. Is not always the cheapest one that are the best, make sure you read the reviews. If a freelancer don’t have reviews from other customers then ask them for work samples so you can decide if they good or not.

After 18 month I can say that we are at the moment experience enormous inflation in the internet economy. The hour rate for a freelancer have raised over 150% in the last year. The amount of people working as freelancers have also increased. China is the country where the prices have increased the most, more then 200% on a year. This is due to Chinese language skills are hard to find and many companies need to translate there sites and texts to Chinese. There is also a problem with more new buyers that don’t really know how much to pay there freelancers per hour.

A majority of all freelancers are situated in India. But I wouldn’t recommend them, hire a Philippine or a Chinese instead. Philippines and Chinese can think for them self, Indian freelancers are so afraid of making wrong so they will end up asking you about everything and that takes a lot of time. Most of the communication is done through different IM softwares (like gtalk, msn, icq, skype, yahoo im).

Today oDesk released an interesting service, where they have based on there freelancers average rate and location have aggregated country specific price maps in google maps. Unfortunately this map will only raise the salaries more, because they aren’t reflecting the reality. I’ve been trying a lot of different sites to find good and competent people, and oDesk is not the cheapest, see list below.

According to oDesk you will have to pay 14$ per hour for a freelancer in India, this is not true. Maybe on oDesk, but if you go to other sites on the net you will find that the rates are often negotiable. If “Bevarn” from India have listed his hourly rate to 15$, you can always talk him down to a much lower salary. But don’t go to low, it should be a win-win situation. You should always pay what you think is fare, there’s no point in forcing people in to slavery.

So for the list of places to buy good services to good prices.

Getafreelancer.com
This is by far the biggest and best site to find good people, most people are situated in India, Pakistan, Philippines and China. Lately unfortunately, I’veca noticed an increase of “gold-diggers” on this site. What I mean is people that have heard they can make good money and promise a lot, but don’t really know anything and can’t deliver.

Getacoder.com
Not that big, seems to be a lot of fictive bids (bids made to look like the site are more active and bigger then it really is). The same people here as you can find on GAF (getafreelancer).

oDesk.com
Big site, good features, lot of people. Here you have an even wider spread of people from all over the world. But regarding the prices and hourly rates shown in the image above it’s not that good.

guru.com
Big American site, here you will find many American working for salaries often far higher then Europe. This is probably a good place to find staff in US, that you want to hire for shorter assignments. There are freelancers from China and India here as well, but they are to expensive to work with.

I know I’ve only mentioned some of the sites, last time I looked (in September) there where more then 100 sites for freelancers. But I can really recommend it, it works fine. But beware of Indians promising more then they can deliver. I work with three Indians and it works well, so of course there exist good ones as well.

According to Resume, a newspaper in Sweden, the community is for sale. Lunarstorm is the biggest online community in Sweden, with 1.2 million members, and around 1.1 million unique visitors per week. The users middle age is 18.3 according to Wikipedia.

Lunarstorm was sold for 170 million swedish krones, around 26 million dollar, in the end of 2006. It was acquired by Sven Mörtstedt, a swedish businessman that made his money in real estate.

The question is who will buy it? There are a couple of swedish companies that might be interested in acquiring the community that have had big problems with the international competition from Facebook and Myspace. MTG, Bonnier and Norwegian owned Schibstedt might be possible buyers.

I don’t really watch that much tv online, but I like the thought. So far I’ve just seen Revision3 shows, but today I looked at Natali del Conte’s new show on Cnet. I liked the concept - quick, informatively and good looking host. Normally it’s not that important how the host of the show looks, but this one I liked I hope that the tv blends more with internet so we soon can see these shows in front of the tv instead of the computer.

Natali del conte, went from TechCrunch to hosting the podshow Textra and then to Cnet. Quite a good career leap. Anyway I hope to see more of her shows, and that they are in the same way as this.

Here is actually an old version of her previous show Textra

I finally got it to work. Actually it wasn’t that hard. Once I knew what to look for

So basically for all people how follow my microbloging at Jaiku, now you can also see my posts from this blog.

I found a good description on how-to use Jaiku with Wordpress written by RickMeasham

Today I launched new categories in several of our sites, we also added Pixmania prices as a complement to shopping.com in UK market.

At the moment there’s a total of 13 viable categories on testfreaks.com, and the new ones from today are in the US.

Xbox360 games
Playstation3 games

In germany we launched

Xbox360 spiele
Playstation3 spiele
Heimkinosystem
Monitore

And in russia we launched

Игры на Playstation3
Игры на XBox360

Next up in US is GPS Navigation, multifunctional printers and more gaming categories. In Sweden we are working hard in gathering new gaming sources so we can launch this here as well. A funny thing hit me, most of the swedish gaming sites have english names.

For those who are more interested in my work, can follow my micro-blogging on Jaiku.

Last weeks I’ve been working with the quality on Testfreaks concerning new products and future categories. And a thing that hit me is the problem with product names and different markets. Since Testfreaks will be launched on several markets we need to keep track on product names on different markets. Same product but different names, and we need to know of this. By giving the product several names in our system we are making this possible, but still - why make this so complicated? Why can’t manufacturer just keep one name on the products.

Another thing that struck me is the lack of good images on products. The big manufacturer like Sony, Pioneer and JVC for examples are good. But most of them are really crap at giving good images on there products. This is particularly a problem with older products, the only good images out there are 100 x 100 this is not worth showing. Do anyone know of any good site with really good product images?

Internet makes the shopping more difficult since you can’t actually touch a product, instead we look at images and read good reviews. So if the manufacturer don’t provide good images, are we just going to skip buying there products? It’s a big focus on new products but there’s also a big secondhand market with consumer electronics, and they are also in need of good images.

And please, all manufacturer that use flash, remove all flash from your pages, since this is impossible to crawl in a good way and the site is much harder to navigate etc. Not to mention extract images from.

Since I’m in the business of so called Web2.0 projects I can’t stop wondering on where all the money goes. All these new named (often stupid names) companies that have great ideas (most of them do), they get a lot of venture capital lives a few month or up to a year and then they spent all there money. The trend looks like it did in the end of 2001, but this time Internet companies actually make money, and there are income models that works online. I stumbled over this really fun video about this problem.

This weekend there was an interesting conference, around the web and mobile applications, held in Stockholm. I missed the registration to the event, so I thought I had missed it entirely. But when I surfed around on Hubbub’s homepage I found the back channels on Jaiku and Onelinr, so the first hour I tried to follow the conference from them. But it didn’t workout that good since I missed sound and video from the people that talked on stage. I then discovered that I had a colleague from Testfreaks sitting in the audience, and he phoned me up on Skype. This way I could listen to the entire conference through his built-in microphone. This was an interesting and new (for me) way to attend a conference. I even got the chance, through the back channels at Jaiku, to ask Hjalmar Winbladh from Rebtel a question I had about the Android.

Next time I hope the people behind Hubbub set up a proper Skypeconference that many people can login to and listen. Since the entire event is held in English there must be a big potential audience for this kind of events.

I haven’t written any in a long time, mainly because I haven’t had time. It’s so much to do at Testfreaks at the moment, we are really showing good progress.

Last week I went to Daytona Session vol 1, in Stockholm. Daytona Session was is an Internet Conference that discussed the online future and what will come the next five years.

One of the speakers, Johan Ronnestam at Foreign, had a really interesting speak about this, where he listed 10 things to come the next 5 years.

He gave a good brief in what he thought was the really good things that would come over the next years. He spoke about some new business marketing roles that we might see over the next years. Where SEO manager where the top one. But he also mentioned some other new interesting roles as feed content managers, social customer manager(handle all customer support online on every community that excist), where the companies need to be more focused on what information they are spreading and how they deliver these.

It will be really interesting to see if there will be more of this, hopefully a volym 2 with more internet focus. It was a little bit to much about journalism mumbo jumbo.

If you understand swedish, you can take a look at Johan Ronnestams presentations here.

Take a moment to think of how the future will look like on the internet. And what will the next generation of Internet users do online? What will be the next big thing online? When will the majority of Africa connect?